Awesome new albums, spectacular stage performances and a host of fantastic films – they are all featured in our critics’ picks of the best of music, theatre and film.
Our experts have explored all the options for culture vultures to get their teeth into, and decided on the music, plays and movies that are well worth dedicating your weekend to.
Read on to find out what to see and do…
MUSIC
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Kings Of Leon
Can We Please Have Fun Out now
Hailed as ‘the Southern Strokes’ when they emerged 21 years ago, Kings Of Leon made their name as a raw and energetic garage band who mixed country, blues and indie-rock. But, as frontman Caleb Followill makes abundantly clear on a new song called Hesitation Generation, they are changing tack. ‘Let’s take this thing apart, rebuild it with our own hands,’ he sings.
For the Nashville family quartet (the three Followill brothers, Caleb, Jared and Nathan, and their guitar-playing cousin Matthew) the change of heart doesn’t involve a betrayal of their rock roots. Their latest album is still dotted with singalongs — songs like Television and Nothing To Do — that should be greeted with a sea of hands when they headline the BST Festival in London’s Hyde Park next month.
Hailed as ‘the Southern Strokes’ when they emerged 21 years ago, Kings Of Leon made their name as a raw and energetic garage band but on their new album they are changing tack
But by teaming up with a new collaborator — British producer Tom Hull — they have also freshened up their sound. Hull (aka Kid Harpoon) has worked with Miley Cyrus (on last year’s chart-topping single Flowers) and Florence Welch, but he’s best known as a co-writer on pop pin-up Harry Styles’s multi award-winning Harry’s House album.
His smooth, modern production provides a timely boost for Kings Of Leon, who have been largely treading water since 2008’s smash hit single Sex On Fire. They have endured internal squabbles and overcome Spinal Tap travails that saw gigs cancelled or abandoned due to high winds (Benicàssim in Spain), a tour bus fire (London’s O2 Arena), and, most bizarrely, a stage invasion by pigeons (St Louis, Missouri).
Can We Please Have Fun continues the band’s penchant for picking five-syllable album titles (2016’s WALLS was actually a shortened version of We Are Like Love Songs) and it shuns the experimental leanings of 2021’s When You See Yourself for something more streamlined.
A new approach is apparent from the off, with Ballerina Radio built around slide guitar and breezy keyboards. The lightness of touch that is a hallmark of Hull’s work with Styles is also evident on Nowhere To Run, which takes the Kings into unexpectedly funky terrain.
The brightness, alas, doesn’t extend to the lyrics. On Nothing To Do, Caleb sings of ‘panic on the streets’ and the end of civilisation. On Nowhere To Run, his focus switches to ‘a war outside’ and ‘a 747 in a blood moon sky’ (although he undermines the gravitas slightly by adding: ‘I’m just waiting for a beverage to accompany my pie’).
Kings Of Leon, to be fair, have never been noted for their lyrics, and the pie line isn’t the only silly one on the album. Caleb sings of his supper again on Ballerina Radio (‘ravioli and plastic parmesan’), and Split Screen finds him admiring his lover’s tresses (‘I’m a fan of your extensions, your hair is like a puzzle’).
But that shouldn’t detract from a refreshing return that finishes with the country-ish ballad Ease Me On — sung in a southern croon, with a nod to Elvis Presley’s version of Always On My Mind — and the guitar-driven Seen. ‘The weight has finally been lifted,’ concludes Caleb. It certainly feels that way.
Adrian Thrills
FOUR MORE AWESOME ALBUMS OUT NOW
KEANE: Hopes And Fears 20
Remastered to coincide with its 20th anniversary, Keane’s debut has stood the test of time superbly.
Crowned best album at the BRITs in 2005, it was a coming-of-age saga that paired Tom Chaplin’s choirboy vocals with Tim Rice-Oxley’s haunting keyboard melodies on anthems such as Somewhere Only We Know and Everybody’s Changing.
Reissued in various formats — including double vinyl and triple CD — the new package includes B-sides, out-takes and demos that reiterate the built-in beauty of some great songs.
Adrian Thrills
KELLY JONES: Inevitable Incredible
The raspy-voiced Welsh rocker boldly strips away the bombast of his day job fronting the Stereophonics to deliver a solo album made in six days on a remote Norwegian island.
Built around piano rather than guitar, it’s his answer to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. The title track opens with crashing waves and dramatic keyboards before taking wing on the back of a ten-piece string ensemble.
Jones’s melodic instincts remain strong, too, with Time’s Running Away a minor chord delight, and guest Jason Mowery’s pedal steel adding a country feel.
Adrian Thrills
DUA LIPA: Radical Optimism
Radical Optimism is a buoyant collection of breezy dance and luxuriantly produced pop that may well end up sound-tracking the summer. Dua Lipa says she was inspired by the confidence shown by British music in the 1990s and she displays a similar level of self-belief.
French Exit is as close as the album gets to a full-blown ballad, but there are still surprises. One is Falling Forever, a 1980s-leaning soft rock number. Another is Maria, all flamenco strums and skipping Latin beats.
A classy comeback.
Adrian Thrills
SINÉAD HARNETT: Boundaries
First tipped on by me in 2015, homegrown R&B star Harnett has yet to break into the pop mainstream, but she’s now finding her feet after moving from London to LA.
This is her third album, and it’s her most assured yet, framing her silky vocals with glitchy beats, acoustic guitars and soulful strings.
Writing about her romantic turmoil and personal growth, she deploys some sharp lyrical phrases. ‘We went from amazing to a maze,’ she sings on The Most, while there are shades of Amy Winehouse’s first album, Frank, on the jazzy Downtown.
Adrian Thrills
THEATRE
SHOW OF THE WEEK
Much Ado About Nothing
Dare we hope that our damp British summer may yet match the bright warm sunshine of the new production of Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare’s Globe?
The story is of mutually loathing Beatrice and Benedick, who are tricked by their friends into thinking they’re secretly in love with each other. And it’s presented in its Sicilian setting, with Sean Holmes’s production going for colour not catechism, and filling the venue with rolling laughter.
Amalia Vitale’s bite-sized Beatrice has a merry, skipping wit, and seems genuinely perturbed by the unexpected affection of Benedick (a full-bodied Ekow Quartey)
Some clouds follow Beatrice’s cousin, Hero, who is stood up at the altar. But these are quickly dispelled thanks to poetry that’s memorably rooted in the body — whether it be Beatrice’s talk of stopping mouths with a kiss, or Benedick swearing he will live in her heart, die in her lap and be buried in her eyes (still one of the greatest chat-up lines ever written).
Amalia Vitale’s bite-sized Beatrice has a merry, skipping wit, and seems genuinely perturbed by Benedick’s unexpected affection.
Ekow Quartey, meanwhile, is a full-bodied Benedick, twice the size of Beatrice and adding physical comedy to the prospect of their romantic union.
There’s strong acting throughout, with John Lightbody as Hero’s father Leonato, shown as a doting dad thrown into a panic by his daughter’s defamation.
And as for Hero herself, Lydia Fleming — like her betrothed Claudio (Adam Wadsworth) — is a vulnerable teenager shocked by the world’s vicissitudes.
Jonnie Broadbent, as constable Dogberry, makes light work of the Dad’s Army-style Elizabethan police force. His broad, verbal comedy is matched by the dazzling, orange and blue palette of Grace Smart’s design.
And this is topped by Elizabethan costumes and a carnival of animals for the masked ball that sees a cat (Beatrice) put among the pigeons (Benedick). Loosen a button and bathe in their warmth.
Patrick Marmion
Shakespeare’s Globe, London. Until August 24, 2hrs 40mins
FOUR OTHER SPARKLING SHOWS
Laughing Boy
Connor’s mum, Sara, calls her son LB, short for Laughing Boy. Also London Buses, which her fun, funny child cuddled as others kids cuddle teddies. He hated shops, loud noise and darkness. He was ‘quirky’, says Sara, an Oxford academic, smiling through tears. Autistic, epileptic, Connor saw things in his own way. He could be a ‘handful’, but he was easy to love.
Janie Dee (in orange) is extraordinary in an almost unbearable, but essential, play
Notice the past tense. Aged 18, Connor left his special school, where he was safe and happy, and moved into the next phase of ‘care’: an Assessment and Treatment Unit run by Southern Health. He was never assessed. He was ‘treated’ with sedatives. Reports of his seizures were ignored. Locked in a bathroom, while his supervisor ordered groceries on-line, he drowned.
Stephen Unwin’s devastating dramatisation of his mother’s published memoir begins on that unforgettable scorching day in 2013.
So starts Sara’s tireless, fearless mission to expose the scandal of neglect and indifference which lead to Connor’s entirely preventable death while under NHS ‘care’. It culminates — and the irony is savage — with a tense, sickening scene in which Sara herself is put on trial, accused of going to work, instead of staying at home with her son, judged ‘monstrous’ by his case-worker.
Blurry images of children singing, of a smiling little Connor are projected on a curved white wall — like the end of a bath. Treasured videos. But Connor himself is ever-present, played by Alfie Friedman, intensely alive, asking questions, making statements, always ending in the word ‘Mum’. The connection between them is extraordinary, as is Janie Dee’s performance as his doggedly determined mother, her searing grief contained, her fury and frustration spilling over.
Almost unbearable, but essential campaigning theatre.
Georgina Brown
Jermyn Street Theatre, London. Until May 31; Theatre Royal, Bath, June 4-8, 1hr 40mins
The Buddha Of Suburbia
Emma Rice has delivered a charming, funny and joyfully bawdy adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel about his semi-autobiographical alter-ego Karim (Dee Ahluwalia), who comes of age as a randy young actor in the late 1970s.
Emma Rice has delivered a joyfully bawdy adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel
This of course was before the advent of today’s intimacy co-ordinators, #MeToo, and the appropriateness authorities. And there are aspects of Karim’s story which may make prudes and puritans tut-tut.
Oddly, though, Kureishi seems as eager to deploy Indian stereotypes as he does to denounce them.
Karim’s father (Ankur Bahl) is an adulterous immigrant, riven with guilt and, in line with eccentric Indian characterisation, a yogic acrobat who does headstands in Y-fronts in his living room.
Karim, like the author, can be a little charmless and pleased with himself. But Ahluwalia makes a cheeky bed hopper who works best as an observer of others.
Yes, there are casualties of the careless sex, drugs and rock’n’roll attitudes of the time but this show is less concerned with correcting our behaviour than with celebrating a lost sense of freedom and playfulness.
Patrick Marmion
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until June 1, 2hrs 50mins
Midsummer
It’s good to fall in love with a set, even more if it helps tell the story. For David Greig’s tale of a disreputably memorable weekend in Edinburgh, Libby Todd has built a doll’s-house mash-up of the Old Town: tenement and mansion, cathedral and bridges. They open and shut, show sudden projected messages and are scrambled over for a swooping, darting adventure in a fresh-hearted romcom about two midlife disappointments solidifying into love.
Karen Young and Ross Carswell star in David Greig’s fresh-hearted romcom
Lawyer Helena (Karen Young) is stood up by her married lover and picks up Bob (Ross Carswell). He once dreamed of busking through Europe, but actually works for a car thief. They are both 35, and decide to hook up and get so drunk they’ll forget it.
Expect the funniest, truest, most excruciatingly recognisable sex scene of the year, followed by a unique moment in which Bob, alone and still drunk, is given a severe talking-to by his own willy (played with deadpan irritability by narrator Will Arundell in a rubber hat). The disapproving appendage complains that it’s tired of stupid, pointless adventures and strange partners, and wants stability.
Gordon McIntyre’s songs drive the tale along with dry rock-ballad lyrics: ‘Gimme darkness, gimme pain, and take it all away!’, as the two narrators and the lovers nimbly snatch up guitar, flute, saxophone or fiddle.
They meet again, she in a bridesmaid dress with sick on it, he nervously clutching £15,000 of his boss’s money in a plastic Tesco carrier bag. Stumbling and talking in the granite mazes of the old city, they find comradeship.
Greig writes with tender delicacy — always a prose poet, no syllable wasted — as he leads a disorderly progress between cafés, benches, arches, an IKEA car park and a Japanese fetish nightclub. The narrators add miniature lectures on brain science, but beautifully — as the sun at last breaks through the fog — it’s love that makes sense.
Libby Purves
Mercury Theatre, Colchester. Until May 18; Barn Theatre, Cirencester, May 22-June 22, 2hrs
LAST CHANCE: Opening Night
Based on a long-forgotten 1977 John Cassavetes film, Opening Night is about a Broadway actress, Myrtle, having a nervous breakdown after witnessing the death of a fan outside the theatre. Yet it’s almost as if Ivo Van Hove’s musical resurrection is seeking to give star Sheridan Smith a real-life nervous breakdown of her own.
There are moments in Opening Night when I was in awe of Sheridan Smith’s acting
The on-stage clutter of a documentary film crew recording rehearsals of the story’s play within the play locks her into a state of febrile isolation, and encourages the actors to ignore the audience and perform to cameras instead. So, when Smith does finally register us, the effect is electric.
Rufus Wainwright’s music explodes with the singer-songwriter’s gift for doomed glory but it’s largely thanks to the emotional wattage of Smith’s voice that the show really soars. There are moments, too, when I was simply in awe of her acting.
She switches between playing herself, her actress character and the actress’ character in the play within the play. Stumbling through this psychological armageddon, she has a cheekiness and vulnerability which is as dangerous as it is riveting.
All the other characters – bar Shira Haas as the ghost – are cardboard cut-outs by comparison.
There are many reasons to be dismayed by this show, but Smith somehow defies Van Hove’s attempt to derail her.
Patrick Marmion
Gielgud Theatre, London. Until May 18, 2hr 30mins
FILM
FILM OF THE WEEK
Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes
Cert: 12A, 2hr 25mins
Whatever Sir David Attenborough is planning for his 98th birthday celebrations this week, it surely won’t be a family outing to see Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes. The great man knows what remarkable creatures they are without seeing hot-tempered gorillas tasering their enemies and a mild-mannered orangutan giving a history lesson.
But anyway, here we are, with another powerful dose of inverted anthropomorphism in which sophisticated apes rule, and humans are grunting savages. This is the fourth film in the Planet Of The Apes reboot franchise, and while the term ‘reboot franchise’ might make you want to swing quickly from the trees in the opposite direction, it’s actually not bad.
In what I suppose has to be a nutshell, a kindly, notably intelligent ape called Noa (Owen Teague) sets out to find his tribe after they are captured and enslaved by the tyrannical Proximus (Kevin Durand) and his army of thugs.
Raka (played by Peter Macon), Noa (played by Owen Teague), and Freya Allan as Mae in the latest instalment of the Planet Of The Apes franchise
It’s a hairy expedition in more ways than one. But on the way Noa befriends the wise orangutan Raka (Peter Macon), who, it is gently implied, is gay. You might think this is wokeism gone mad, but in truth he’s exactly the kind of post-apocalyptic orangutan who might have a handle on LGBTQ issues.
Next, Raka and Noa encounter a human, Mae (Freya Allan), who turns out to be one of the few of her kind who can talk. She might even help to outsmart the terrifying Proximus, who deludedly thinks himself the natural successor of mighty Caesar (played in earlier films by Andy Serkis) and has his own talking human acolyte (William H. Macy).
Proximus is smart enough to know that centuries earlier, when humans were at their peak, they were able to fly, to ‘level mountains’, to ‘speak across oceans’. He craves this knowledge, rather in the way that King Louie in The Jungle Book (1967) yearns for the secret of man’s red fire, only he’s not nearly as much fun.
Towards the blessed end, which is almost two and a half hours from the start, the film gets decidedly bogged down in silliness. In some respects, of course, it’s silly throughout. But the effects are excellent and the verisimilitude of the apes is genuinely stunning. On the whole director Wes Ball does a fine job, as does writer Josh Friedman even if he fails to swerve a metaphorical banana skin, overdoing the ‘apes are like humans, humans are like apes’ gags.
I also worry about the daft title, and the dispiriting prospect of so many more of these films being made that, like the old song about King Caractacus, we end up with the Realm Of The Empire Of The Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes. But in the meantime, there’s just enough life left in the ‘reboot franchise’ to make this worth seeing.
They don’t make ’em like they used to, though. The original Planet Of The Apes (1968) will always be the best.
Brian Viner
FOUR MORE FABULOUS FILMS TO SEE IN CINEMAS
Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger
Cert: 12A, 2hr 11mins
Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger is a joy for those of us who consider the 30 years from 1940 to 1970, give or take, to represent the golden era of British film-making.
Made In England is an affectionately insightful, celebratory documentary
One of the executive producers is Martin Scorsese, who also presents this affectionately insightful, celebratory, altogether fascinating documentary.
Scorsese explains how Michael Powell, the son of a Kent hop farmer, and Emeric Pressburger, the Hungarian-Jewish refugee from Nazism who arrived in London in 1935 speaking barely a word of English, united to make a series of quintessentially British cinematic masterpieces such as The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter Of Life And Death (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948).
He tells us how those films influenced a generation of high-achieving American directors led by himself and Francis Ford Coppola; the duelling scene in The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp informed a pivotal scene in his own 1980 masterpiece Raging Bull.
By then, he and Powell had become friends, indeed their relationship helped to rescue Powell from somewhat impoverished obscurity.
In 1984, at a grand old age, Powell married Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker. She is also an executive producer of this riveting documentary, along with George Harrison’s widow, Olivia.
Brian Viner
The Idea Of You
Cert: 15, 1hr 55mins
Also available on Amazon Prime
In real life, the age gap between 41-year-old Anne Hathaway and 29-year-old Mary & George star Nicholas Galitzine is just 12 years, but in The Idea Of You it’s been expanded to 16, presumably to underline the point its makers want to make about how unfairly society treats couples where the woman is the older partner.
All hell breaks loose when Solene (Anne Hathaway) dates Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine)
After all, when Solene’s ex-husband dumped her for a younger work colleague nobody batted an eyelid but when Solene (Hathaway) tentatively starts a relationship with Hayes (Galitzine) all hell breaks loose.
But then not only is he younger, he’s also the lead singer of August Moon, one of the biggest boy bands in the world.
This is all nicely and plausibly played out, funny at times, a little contrived at others. But it neatly avoids the cougar cliches and, at my screening, seemed to be going down particularly well with women.
Matthew Bond
Cert: 12A, 2hrs 6mins
The Fall Guy is a much less interesting film than Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, but at one level it does the same thing, elevating the stunt double to the status of leading man.
Ryan Gosling (above) and Emily Blunt have proper screen chemistry in The Fall Guy
David Leitch’s film is notionally inspired by the 1980s TV series of the same title, and centres on Ryan Gosling’s Colt Seavers, the best ‘fall guy’ in the business, who risks life and limb for the greater glory of a narcissistic star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).
When we meet Colt, he has been swept off his feet not by a CGI wave but by camera operator Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). Alas, their relationship is torpedoed when Colt breaks his back after a stunt goes wrong. He withdraws from her, and from movie work generally, but 18 months later he is persuaded back to work on a blockbuster whose first-time director is… Jody Moreno.
She’s startled by his sudden reappearance, and none too delighted, but she and her movie need his expertise. Moreover, she is unaware that her star Ryder has fallen in with some disreputable rascals and gone missing. The film’s shrill producer, Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), believes that Colt is the person best equipped to return Ryder to the production. Colt’s other, evidently tougher challenge is to win back Jody.
That’s the plot in a nutshell, and a nutshell is all it needs: it’s silly and implausible. But Gosling and Blunt jointly have enough charisma and proper screen chemistry to give it most of the necessary heft although it does run out of steam about two-thirds of the way through.
But, as a celebration of stunts and those who fearlessly perform them, The Fall Guy can’t be faulted.
Brian Viner
Cert: 15, 2hrs 11mins
The makers of Challengers – and star Zendaya herself co-produces – get pretty much everything else spot-on in a film that is sporty, ridiculously sexy at times and, like other films directed by the Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, absolutely gorgeous to look at.
Challengers’ makers, including Zendaya, have got just about everything spot on
At the outset, Tashi (Zendaya) is watching the final of a Challenger tournament (a step down from the better-known competitions) between her husband Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (an excellent Josh O’Connor).
There is no sign the players even know each other until the screenplay skips back 13 years and we discover they used to be doubles partners and best friends. And that they were both besotted with the same girl. Ah, that’ll be Zendaya again, now alarmingly convincing as an 18-year-old tennis player with the world, not to mention both boys, at her feet.
I loved it, particularly its use of music, despite getting slightly befuddled by all the jumping about in time.
Matthew Bond
